This award-winning documentary on the militarization of police will leave you speechless

Like many in the US, filmmaker Craig Atkinson was glued to the
news coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. But
Atkinson was unsettled by what he saw during the manhunt for the
bombers.

"I was shocked by the way that the police were approaching the
community," Atkinson told Business Insider, recalling SWAT teams
searching homes without warrants. "It was
like fear had got the best of us."

Atkinson's father was a police officer in Oak Park, Michigan, a
northern suburb of Detroit, for 29 years and became a member of
its SWAT team when it was formed in 1989. His memories as a child
are filled with playing the hostage as his dad's SWAT team
conducted training drills and, when he got to his teens, playing
an armed assailant.

With a unique eye to the evolution of SWAT over his life,
Atkinson saw in the Boston Marathon bombing a disturbing reality
in the militarization of the police in the US.

"It was such a departure from the way that I felt my dad's SWAT
team approached the community," he said.

So Atkinson decided to investigate it in his directorial feature
debut, "Do Not Resist."

Atkinson teamed with producer Laura Hartrick to make a gripping
documentary (which won the best documentary grand jury award at
this year's Tribeca Film Festival) that examines how police
departments across the US are using government grants to beef up
with military equipment to fight terrorism. But for small towns
that do not face the same kind of threats as Boston or New York,
the equipment is used mostly by SWAT teams to serve search
warrants and assist in crowd control.

An MRAP in "Do Not Resist."Vanish Films

Starting in 2013, Atkinson traveled the country to investigate
the militarization phenomenon. He visited a SWAT competition in
Florida; got a ride-along on a new MRAP, a
vehicle designed to withstand IEDs, that the police department of
Wisconsin's Juneau County (murders in 2014, zero) just received;
and sat in on a city-council meeting in Concord, New Hampshire,
(murders since 2004: two) for the approval of a BearCat, or ballistic engineered armored response
counter attack truck, for its police department.

But the movie changed when 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally
shot by the police in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

"Before Ferguson, we had 80 hours of footage to educate people,"
Atkinson said. "That was no longer needed because the Ferguson
story showed it."

Atkinson and Hartrick raced to Ferguson and captured incredible
footage of the protests that occurred there following Brown's
death (Atkinson is best known for his cinematography work on
films by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady like "Detropia" and "Norman
Lear: Just Another Version of You," for which he had an
additional cinematographer/camera operator credit). With officers
seen in riot gear, some shooting tear gas from atop BearCats,
Atkinson believes the movie paints a clearer picture of the
Ferguson police department's actions than cable-news coverage did
at the time.

"Most news outlets there had to go file stories at 10 or 11
o'clock at night," Atkinson said. "But we had the luxury to just
wait it out until the end, and there were a lot of exchanges
between the police and the community in those hours when no one
was looking that changes the entire dynamic of what was being
reported."

Ferguson footage from "Do Not
Resist."Vanish
Films

Atkinson shows SWAT teams following crowds back into their
neighborhoods and deploying tear gas after the city-imposed
curfew. Officers can be seen facing off with citizens who are
standing on their own front lawns.

But with his general knowledge of SWAT procedure, Atkinson also
noticed what seemed like a lack of training by the Ferguson
police.

"They would shoot the tear gas towards the crowds but also on the
sides of them, so they had nowhere to go but towards the police,"
Atkinson said.

In the haze of tear gas, Atkinson captured on film one female
protester saying to anyone who would listen: "They need to stop
giving these boys these toys because they don't know how to
handle them."

"Do Not Resist" also explores the future of policing, featuring
conversations with people behind aerial surveillance and face
recognition, both of which are being used in some US police
departments. Then there's the work of Richard Berk, a professor
who is developing an algorithm that seems taken out of "Minority
Report," as it predicts at a person's birth whether the person
will become a criminal.

But the section of the movie that is likely to remain with most
viewers long after watching are the words of the top trainer of
military law enforcement in the country, Dave Grossman.

Atkinson was allowed to film Grossman's class, which was full of
SWAT commanders from across the country, and what is revealed is
a chilling presentation in which Grossman tells the men such
things as "we are at war and you're the frontline troops in this
war" and "the best sex you've had in your life" is when you come
back home alive from the job.

Craig Atkinson.Tiffany
Frances

"I just wanted to show the American people who their officers are
being trained by," Atkinson said, "and I want Dave Grossman to
have to explain himself to why this is the most effective way to
police our streets in this era. I think we have outgrown that
philosophy and we need to evolve it to accommodate what our
society is actually asking us. Let's go back to a
protect-and-serve model."

Business Insider contacted Grossman, and though he said he had
not seen the movie, he had seen the trailer, which he is in, and
thought it to be "horrendously irresponsible."

"It's got a quote of me saying, 'We are at war and you're the
frontline troops in this war,' but in the context of Ferguson.
That was the context they created," Grossman said. "I was talking
about this land and 9/11 attacks and what's coming down the road
as far as terrorist attacks. In time of war, law enforcement is
essentially troops on American soil. I think that there's
9/11-scale attacks coming. What they may do is attack schools,
day cares, and school buses, and what I was telling my cops is
when that happens there is no elite delta force that's going to
show up to save your kids — you're it."

When asked whether he was worried that his teachings might get
misconstrued and that SWAT members might bring his thinking to
situations like that in Ferguson in 2014 or in Charlotte this
month instead of a terrorist act, Grossman said: "I don't teach
tactical — I teach the mental side of the game."

Dave
Grossman.YouTube/Vanish
Films

Grossman also dislikes the term "militarization of police." He
describes things like MRAPs and BearCats as "tools" that the
police "are using to stay alive."

"My presentation is always evolving, always talking about the
latest science, the latest physiology, the latest case studies,"
Grossman said. "It is truly the most successful military
law-enforcement training. Are all of these police chiefs that
come to my training, are they all insane? These [filmmakers] set
out to do something horrendously irresponsible. It's part of the
whole war-on-cops left-wing mantra, and it is enormously harmful
to business."

In a response to the above remarks by Grossman, Atkinson sent an
email saying: "The righteous violence that Dave Grossman
instructs officers to deploy may be effective when fighting ISIS,
but while the police are preparing for the next 9/11 attack, they
are engaged in 63 million police-citizen interactions a year. It
is irresponsible to think that you can teach the 'mental side of
the game' while not considering the broad application in which
this mentality is deployed. I think it's important to note that
Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who reflexively
shot and killed Philando Castile as he reached for his wallet
during a routine traffic stop, had previously undergone Grossman's Bulletproof
Warrior training."